Year’s Best SF 15 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer Page B

Congregationalist,” she told me, “eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down the pike. That’s your side of the family, Tom, not mine.”
    True enough. Maggie’s people were Episcopalians who had prospered in Michigan since before it was a State—sturdy, reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the lake trade. My father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a single term in the Massachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother’s bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women’s Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie’s people understood that poverty and gentility could truly coexist.
    â€œMaggie’s indisposed today,” I had told Percy, who may or may not have believed me, and then we had settled down to the business of planning our three-month tour of the South, according to the map he had made.
    â€œThere ought to be photographs,” Percy said, “before it’s all gone.”
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    We traveled several miles from the tavern, sweating in the airless heat of the morning, following directions Percy had deduced from bills-of-transfer, railway records, and old advertisements placed in the Richmond and Atlanta papers.
    The locality to which we were headed had been called Pilgassi Acres. It had been chartered as a business by two brothers, Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi of South Carolina, in 1879, and it had operated for five years before the Ritter Inquiry shut it down.
    There were no existing photographs of Pilgassi Acres, or any of the institutions like it, unless the Ritter Inquiry hadcommissioned them. And the Final Report of the Ritter Inquiry had been sealed from the public by consent of Congress, not to be reopened until some time in the twentieth century.
    Percy Camber intended to shed some light into that officially ordained darkness.
    He sat with me on the driver’s board of the carriage as I coaxed the team over the rutted and runneled trail. This had once been a wider road, much used, but it had been bypassed by a Federal turnpike in 1887. Since then nature and the seasons had mauled it, so the ride was tedious and slow. We subdued the boredom by swapping stories: Percy of his home in Canada, me of my time in the army.
    Percy “talked white.” That was the verdict Elsebeth had passed after meeting him. It was a condescending thing to say, excusable only from the lips of a child, but I knew what she meant. Percy was two generations out of slavery. If I closed my eyes and listened to his voice, I could imagine that I had been hired by some soft-spoken Harvard graduate. He was articulate, even for a newspaper man. And we had learned, over the course of this lengthy expedition, to make allowances for our differences. We had some common ground. We were both the offspring of radical parents, for example. The “madness of the fifties” had touched us both, in different ways.
    â€œYou suppose we’ll find anything substantial at the end of this road?” Percy asked.
    â€œThe landlady mentioned some old sheds.”
    â€œSheds would be acceptable,” Percy said, his weariness showing. “It’s been a long haul for you, Tom. And not much substantial work. Maybe this time?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œDocuments, oral accounts, that’s all useful, but a photograph—just one, just to show that something remains—well, that would be important.”
    â€œI’ll photograph any old shed you like, Percy, if it pleases you.” Though on this trip I had seen more open fields—long since burned over and regrown—than anything worthy of being immortalized. Places edited from history. Absencesconstructed as carefully as architecture. I had no reason to think Pilgassi Acres would be